In this video, we'll use the Warp Stabilizer effect. And take a quick tour through its interface .Let's being first by previewing the movie that we're going to stabilize. (audio playing) And we have an abrupt horizontal camera movement. And some bouncing up and down. There are several ways to apply the Warp Stabilizer effect. One way, to with the layer selected, choose Animation > Stabilize motion. Another way, is to in the Tracker panel, click the Stabilize Motion button. Yet another way is to right-click the layer, or Ctrl+Click on Mac OS. And choose Stabilize Motion.

And another way, still in the Effects and Presets panel. Search for Warp Stabilizer and drag it onto the layer, we'll use this way. Warp Stabilizer is now analyzing the background. Unlike many things in After Effects, when a Warp Stabilizer is working on the background. You can actually do other things, including, changing settings in the Warp Stabilizer effect itself. Or even going, into working on another composition.

Let's go back to the Warp Stabilizer. Composition, and look at some of the settings. As we see here at the top, we get an estimate of the time remaining. Right now, the result is set for Smooth Motion, which is going to keep the camera movement, but just smooth it out. Let's set it for the moment to No Motion, which locks the camera down, so there'll be no camera movement at all. And notice that even though I changed the setting the analysis phase is continuing.

We can choose what method to use for stabilization, the default is Subspace Warp. Subspace Warp makes tiny distortions within the frame to compensate for motion, whereas position only moves the layer as a whole. Position Scale and Rotation moves scales and rotates the layers a whole. And prespective distorts the layer as a whole much as a corner pen operation would do. Looks like we're almost done here. Pay attention to this banner. When the analysis is done it'll switch to a stabilizing phase with a different color banner.

Orange and the stabilizing step is much faster. Essentially the analysis is analyzing the footage. Then the stabilizing phase applies that data for the stabilization. Let's preview the results. Click and preview. And because we choose No Motion, the camera movement is entirely removed. If we instead choose, Smooth Motion stabalizing phase has to happen again, but the analysis phase does not. Preview.

Notice that that abrupt horizontal movement has been smoothed out and a small amount of the vertical movement still, but it's been greatly smoothed out as well. Stop the Preview. If we're smoothing the motion, we can choose how much to mmooth the motion. We can also choose to use one of the other methods.

And we can choose whether to Stabalize, Stabalize and Crop, or Stabalize Crop and Auto-scale which is the default. Stabalize and Synthesize edges is more advanced. We'll keep it at the default for now. Note the autoscaling only having to scale up another 11% or another 11.6%. If we wanted to scale even more, we can do that here. We scale less than 100% for additional scale. We're going to have black edges around the frame.

Probably don't want that. Let's go back to the default of 100. And in advanced, if you choose detailed analysis, the analysis phase has to be repeated. Rolling shutter refers to a type of artifact that occurs with HDSLR cameras. And other cameras that don't record the entire image all at the same time, but instead scan top to bottom. These sorts of motion artifacts are notoriously difficult to remove. But the Warp Stabalizer does a pretty good job. Automatically it reduces some.

But you can process even more heavilly and reduce more. The Crop Less Smooth More parameter lets you decide between how much cropping you have and how much smoothness you have. If you make Crop Less Smooth More all the way to the crop less end, at zero, and then Preview, the result looks quite similar to the original. Because you're not allowing the Warp Stabilizer effect to do any cropping. And if you go to the other extreme, smooth more all the way out to 100 percent.

Things are smoother but much more has had to be cropped we lost more of the image. Let's go back to default of 50% because we're currently not using synthesized edges. These parameters are not relevant. Hide Wanning Banner refers to the orange and blue banners that appeared during the analysis and stabaliztion stages. I prefer to not hide those because I prefer to know what stage the process is. So, that's just a quick tour of the Warp Stabalizer effect's controls.

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

6/13/2011

In this workshop, Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva shows you all of the ways that you can track motion in After Effects, either to stabilize the motion or to apply the motion to another object. Get up to speed on the new Warp Stabilizer effect, which makes stabilizing shaky handheld footage much easier than it was in the past. Plus, see how to use the point tracker, which is the best way to stabilize motion in After Effects CS5 and earlier, and is still useful for some purposes in After Effects CS5.5. Finally, Todd shows how to use the mocha plugin—which ships free with After Effects—for scenes that can't be effectively tracked using the point tracker.